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Dead Ends or Gold Mines?: Using Missionary Records in Mexican-American Women's History Author(s): Vicki Ruz Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1991), pp. 33-56 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346574 . Accessed: 16/04/2011 01:30Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=unp. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

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Vicki Ruiz

Dead Ends or Gold Mines?: Using Missionary Records in Mexican-American Women's History

Peggy Pascoe and Valerie Matsumoto clearly delineated the theoretical issues we face as feminist historians.1 Expanding on their essays, I would like to discuss what is often ill perceived as the flip side of theory that is, methodology. How do we use institutional records (for example, missionary reports, pamphlets, and newsletters) to illuminate the experiences and attitudes of women of color? How do we sift through the bias, the self-congratulation, and the hyperbole to gain insight into women's lives? What can these records tell us of women's agencies? I am intrigued (actually, obsessed is a better verb) with questions involving decisionmaking, specifically with regard to acculturation. What have Mexican women chosen to accept or reject? How have the economic, social, and political environments influenced the acceptance or rejection of cultural messages that emanate from the Mexican community, from U.S. popular culture, from Americanization programs, and from a dynamic coalescence of differing and at times oppositional cultural forms? What were women's real choices? And, to borrow from Jiirgen Habermas, how did they move "within the horizon of their lifeworld"?2 Obviously, no set of institutional records can provide substantive answers, but by exploring these documents in the framework of these larger questions, we place Mexican women at the center of our study, not as victims of poverty and superstition (as they were so often depicted by missionaries) but as women who made choices for themselves and for their families.

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